The power of science and truth: countering paid liars' efforts to influence tobacco policy.

The article by Montini and Bero in this issue of Tobacco Control provides sound insights and sane counsel for tobacco control advocates. There are also intriguing hints of benevolent bias, which bodes well for advocates in sympathetic societies, but a cautionary note for those seeking strong regulation in more tobacco industry friendly political environments. Let me begin with the good news for the cynical. Regulatory decision makers—at least in some parts of the USA—those unelected civil servants who have the power to implement regulatory laws by developing either weak or potent regulations, really do pay attention to science and truth. For tobacco control advocates, it pays to participate in the regulatory process: it pays to prepare testimony and written commentary with great care. It pays to learn how to present data in ways that are both convincing and readily digestible. It also pays to lean heavily upon unimpeachable authority, especially government and quasi-governmental bodies, such as the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Academy of Sciences. For these regulators, the weight of the authority cited compounds the weight of the underlying data. And this good study holds amply deserved bad news for the tobacco industry, its lawyers, and its experts—money does not buy you the goodwill or good opinion of such regulators. The more lawyers you bring with you, the less credibility your witnesses have. The more you pay the scientists who support your position, and publish their findings in captive, non-peer reviewed journals (the glossy printed proceedings of industry sponsored conferences, say, rather than JAMA or Tobacco Control), the more sceptical the regulators become. I once clerked for a federal district judge known for his bluntness, who called all expert witnesses, “paid liars”. Regulators seem to harbour the same bias. And these regulators display a good, healthy bias toward tobacco companies to begin with: “not credible from the get-go”; “always come with mobs of lawyers”. They vow that they have no interest “in listening to Joe Carton complain”. This is the attitude which the regulators surveyed bring to their task of sorting out truth from sophistry. All good news, and it comes with good advice, especially the importance of choosing as witnesses scientists who are eVective advocates. We do not need as witnesses even superb researchers who, paraphrasing James Joyce, live a short distance from comprehensible language, display arrogance, disdain non-scientists, and become intoxicated with the endless recitation of arcane data. Instead, the authors aYrm, we need scientist witnesses who are capable of eVective “self presentation”, who frame the proposed regulation as moderate, reasonable, centrist, in simple terms, and who adopt “formats that can be absorbed”. Most scientists I know shun the compound label “scientist-advocate”. But the research makes very clear that the most eVective witnesses are precisely that: both deeply credentialed and scrupulous scientists and artful advocates. These are rare, but the likes of Ken Warner, JeV Harris, Stan Glantz, Witold Zatonski, and others testify that they do exist!